Forliviamo

2021

Students

Tourism

Autonomous learning
Classroom Context

Italian

Italian

A2
B1
B2
C1
C2

Activity/task
Audio
Picture/Graphics
Video

Vocabulary
Pragmatics

Listening
Reading

Forliviamo is a free mobile application for Italian language and culture incidental learning. It provides the users with language, culture and practical information related to the city of Forlì and its surrounding areas. The app is primarily targeted at a very heterogeneous audience of "tourist-learners": first of all, international students either coming to Forlì for a short period of study or fully enrolled at the University of Bologna (Forlì Campus); international tourists/ workers arriving in Forlì and also native speakers of Italian, who might be interested in a new dimension of interaction with their surroundings.

The contents include both texts and multimedia (images, audio, videos), alongside with links to external resources. They are organized in six main categories, that branch out into several subcategories, containing texts and their related multimedia: 1) University life (Studying at University of Bologna, libraries, meeting places); 2) Itineraries: Architecture of the 1920s-1940s; Medieval route;3) Events: festivals, fairs etc.; 4)Food & drink: local recipes, traditional restaurants; 5) Practical life: health, post office, telephone; 6) Places: museums, theaters etc.. The choice of the general topics is based on retracing the habits of international students both in their daily-life as university students and also as young adults living a new life abroad.

Each content has been labelled as “easy/medium/difficult”. In some cases, multi-media content can be accessed by users through unlocking activities. By answering short multiple-choice quizzes regarding the vocabulary of that text or other previous texts the user can unlock the extra multimedia content. Potentially unknown word or domain-specific words (both in Italian and in the local dialect) are highlighted in blue: by clicking on them users can access a short definition in a pop-up window.

The resource was tested under my supervision and used for self-learning activities by a group of 10 intermediate level students attending the Italian Language L2 course. Each of them chose one of the 6 content categories of the app and within it they chose 3 contents (text+audio/video), where they could familiarise themselves with contents of a historical/tourist/university nature or related to practical life in the city. In doing so, they also took lexical quizzes that unlocked extra multimedia content and allowed them to learn more about certain words given a definition in pop-up windows. At the end of the activity they answered a questionnaire aimed at testing their learning of vocabulary, new content and also their general appreciation of the app, which was generally very enthusiastic.

Navigation within the app does not follow a precise order, each user can move freely between the contents. Assuming a possible procedure to be assigned to students, here are some suggestions.

The app contains six categories of topics (university, tourist itineraries, gastronomy, events, places, practical life). Each of these categories can be used as a complement to an Italian language course that includes these topics. For example: if you are tackling the subject of Italian food, you would assign students to navigate through the "Eating and Drinking" category.

Within that category, each student chooses 3 pieces of content: one at an easy level, one at an intermediate level and one at a difficult level. Alternatively, the teacher assigns them specific content to focus on. They will read the texts, explore the difficult terms with definitions, listen to audio and watch videos of the content.
They will also take vocabulary quizzes to unlock extra multimedia content. At the same time, the teacher will be able to create their own activities to check the learning of the textual and lexical content.